June 12, 2003

• The Further Adventures of Melody Andrewsdottir,
   Lady Shaman

  
  

  Episode Four

  
  

  Editor’s note:  Some of you faithful followers of the Melody saga may have noticed a jump in time or lapse in continuity between recent episodes.  If so, you’re more alert than your editor.  When the restored and transcribed manuscript was returned from Dr. Dreary’s lab (that is Neil Dreary, PhD, professor of shamanism and origami at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople), I printed its first pages, unsuspecting that anything was missing.  Later I received an aplolgetic letter from the good doctor, with a bundle of lipstick-smeared paper towels, and one nasty used Kleenex.  It seems his lab was at that time working on a restoration of the famous and sacred Kleenex of Turin, and an overzealous lab assistant, one night, in clearing up, had inadvertently mixed a few of Melody’s lipstick printed paper towels with Turin’s tissues.  On reflection, the story does make a little more sense now….

  
  

  We take up the tale as Melody leaves her Rodeo Drive thrift shop with her Mentor, Naomi Chortling Wolverine, to prepare for their quest to recover the sacred wedding waffle iron for the Sorority of the Sow:

  
  

  On the cab ride to the airport, where my new-found friend and I would depart for her obscure Indian village, I found my mind’s eye looking simultaneously forward and backward.  Looking back, I had many questions.  Would my business interests suffer?  Would my boyfriend fool around while I was away?  Had I left the vibrator turned on?  Looking forward, still more questions.  Was I indeed the right one to help the Sorority of the Sow recover the sacred wedding waffle iron, and even if so, why was it so important?  Would my quest lead to danger, destruction, disappointment, denigration, capitulation, procrastination, decapitation, or elation?  What would Lady Macbeth say in a similar situation?  Whatever it would be, it would probably rhyme.

  
  

  Naomi broke the silence.  “You are troubled; you have many questions,” she said.

  
  

  I started.  “You are reading my mind again,” I said

  
  

  “No, just your body language.  Whenever I see a woman chewing her nails like that, especially when we’re talking toenails, and particularly without removing the footgear, I know she is troubled.”

  
  

  “Am I really so transparent?” I asked, chagrined.

  
  

  “No, so just chagrin and bear it.  You can conceal your inner thoughts and emotions from most people, including the customers whom you so despise, but not from those of us who have had shamanic training and initiation.  While in New Zealand, at the hands of a !Kabong tribal leader, I had, ” she began to intone, “an arrow inserted in my heart; quartz crystals inserted in my eyes; Q-tips inserted in my ears; and sand inserted in my craw.  Now I have the Strong Eye, not to mention the Strong Ear and a few Strong Other Things.  I see much, know more, remember all, and round up the usual suspects.  This last technique was revealed to me by a rickshaw driver in Casablance,” she added (parenthetically).

  
  

  “Wow,” I said.  “And golly.”  I was sorely impressed.  Shifting my position to ease the soreness, I continued.  “Do you think I can visit the !Kabong and get all that good power stuff?”

  
  

  “Perhaps,” she said.  “But not to worry.  Even if you don’t, you will probably write about it anyway.”

  
  

  Naomi’s words proved prophetic, as prophets’ words generally do.  In coming years I would acquire the power animal, and learn the power gait, the power stroll, the power saunter, the power limerick, and the power mower.  Truly, I would become a lady of power.  Back then, though, I felt about as powerful as a heron with a hangnail, and as wise as a watermelon.

  
  

  “So what’s the deal with the waffle iron, anyway?” I asked.

  
  

  “I will tell you, but watch where you’re spitting those watermelon seeds.  For one thing, there is the design the waffle iron imprints on the waffles.  It includes the nostril in the tetrahedron, the ancient symbol of the Lithuanian Order of the Illegitimati.  Ingesting such waffles can lead to great flashes of insight, not to mention unspeakable indigestion.  Beyond that, however, is the waffle iron itself.  Concealed within its innards is an independent nuclear power supply the size of a scrotum, which can provide the electrical energy needs of one small town, three Nautilus-class submarines, or Roseanne Barr’s exercise machine.  In the right hands, it would do great good;  in the wrong hands…”

  
  

  She shook her head, and the wind chimes she was wearing for earrings jingled sadly.

  
  

  “And it is now in wrong hands?” I asked.

  
  

  “The wrongest.  It is held by Mad Dog, sole surviving member of the GeeGaw Tribe of Hootbladder Indians.  He is so named because of his inordinate fondness for Mad Dog 20-20, a nasty beverage, indeed.”

  
  

  “Being Indian, I should think he’d prefer Thunderbird,” I ventured, in an attempt to lend a note of levity to what was becoming an increasingly grim conversation.

  
  

  “He used to, but stopped.  Made him see pink kachinas.”

  
  

  “Oh.”  So much for levity.

  
  

  “But the most important thing to remember about Mad Dog–and that is only one of his many names–is that he is a twisted descendant of a member of the Ghost Dance Society, being himself a member of the Bugaboo Boogier Booster Club.  The Ghost Dancers, as you will probably not remember since you never knew it, believed their Ghost Shirts could repel bullets.  They tested this belief the hard way, and that is why you don’t find many Ghost Dancers running around these days.  The BBBCs, on the other hand, believe that their BBBC camisoles repel bullets.”

  
  

  “Do they?”

  
  

  “Yes.”

  
  

  “How?”

  
  

  “Kevlar.”

  
  

  “Oh!”  Mad Dog was sounding increasingly formidable, and I said as much.

  
  

  “Mad Dog is sounding increasingly formidable.” I said.

  
  

  “True.  But while he is strong in body and powerful of breath, he is weak in mind.  But enough talk of him for now.  We approach our destination.”

  
  

  “Here we are, girls,” the cabbie said, fumes of cheap strong wine wafting back from the front seat.  I looked at his hack license.  His name was Marvin Dingleberry, and his ID photo showed both front and side views.  I suspected there was something fishy about him, but dismissed the thought.  Maybe he was a Pisces.

  
  

  “Well, Naomi, let’s get on our plane and be off,” I said.

  
  

  And so we were, and so we did.

  
  

  TO BE CONTINUED….

  
  

  This episode originally appeared in The Shaman Papers Volume 3 Number 1, Spring 1991, along with a critical letter to the editor, to which Greyfox responded, in part:

  
  

  
  

  “…review (of Serge Kahili King’s Urban Shaman) would have been much better had I been working with a broader personal data base.  I never heard of Trager massage before reading the above letter, and shiatsu could be a type of Japanese mushroom for all I know.  I have heard of acupuncture, however.  It’s something like Voodoo, only you skip the doll and stick the pins right into the person….”

  
  

  That issue also included an article on shamanic exorcism in which he wrote about our first joint work, when we released two entities who had been sorta half-haunting the house of some people there in Bayard, New Mexico where we were honeymooning.  I say, “half-haunting” because the couple habitually danced a few feet above the floor, with their upper parts out of sight above the roof line.  It seems the home they had lived in on that site, and where they often danced together, had its first floor at a higher elevation than those of the tract houses that replaced their ranch house.

  
  

  In the same issue, Greyfox reviewed what remains to date one of the best books on practical shamanic techniques that either of us has ever read:  Where the Spirits Ride the Wind by Felicitas Goodman.

  
  

  [To clear up any possible confusion caused by mentions of the owner of this blogsite in the third person, your scribe and commentator here at this time is SuSu/KaiOaty/Coyote Medicine/Kathy, the old fart ArmsMerchant's soulmate and partner in crime, filling in between his appearances here with these transcriptions of his priceless older works.  Let him know if you like Mel.  I think we've almost convinced him to continue the saga.]

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